The report from the PID training of trainers workshop that took place in Senegal on 7-17 July is now available and can be downloaded here.
The participants in the workshop were selected from the Prolinnova Country Platforms (CPs), namely Scholastica Atarah from Prolinnova-Ghana, Jackson Kadiaka (Prolinnova-South Africa), Martha Opondo (Prolinnova-Kenya), Augustin Oudraogo (Prolinnova-Burkina Faso), Oumi Ndiaye (Prolinnova-Senegal), Abdou Thiam (Prolinnova-Senegal), Paul Jimmy as Subregional Coordinator (SRC) of the West & Central Africa (WCA) platform and others listed in Annex 1.
The training was facilitated by Djibril Thiam (Prolinnova-Senegal Coordinator), Maggie Rosimo (Prolinnova-Philippines) and Chesha Wettasinha and Brigid Letty, both members of the Prolinnova International Support Team (IST).
The content of the training included sessions on clarification of concepts and assignments on delivery of concepts in a training mode:
Day 1: Introduction to the workshop, to participatory training, to the concept of participation and to selected tools for participatory rural appraisal (PRA)
Day 2: Concepts of local innovation (LI), multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) and agroecology (AE)
Day 3: Concepts of PID, integrating gender into PID, local innovation support facilities (LISFs) and participatory monitoring & evaluation (PME); explanation of the assignment for fieldwork
Day 4: Fieldwork day visiting two local innovations related to desalinating water and reducing the salinity of the soil at an AgriBioServices field site at Kaolack
Day 5: Participants finalised and shared their fieldwork assignments, undertook a PME exercise based on the innovations from the field trip, and reflected on lessons based on the process aspects of the fieldwork (i.e. sharing of facilitation and documentation roles). They continued with a session on documentation, which included an assignment related to farmer-led documentation.
Day 6: Training was restricted to a half day as it was Saturday. It included feedback from the documentation exercise, inputs from Chesha on farmer-led documentation, and some topics that had been parked from previous days were covered including a few more PRA tools.
Day 7: Concept of institutionalisation and a related assignment. Chesha shared a video about a PID process modifying equipment by a farmer innovator in South India, clarified the concept of policy influencing and facilitated planning for the fieldwork the next day.
Day 8: Fieldwork day that included visits to the University of Thiès and FENAB, a federation of farmer associations and organisations. The purpose was to explore institutionalisation of LI/PID within these organisations and to do a related assignment.
Day 9: Groups gave feedback on their institutionalisation-related field assignments. Then the participants worked in pairs to develop context-specific PID training plans, and gave feedback to each other.
Day 10: This was a final half-day of training. The participants were asked to define activities that each would use to share their experiences with other colleagues and in their work places. Tools that could be used for workshop evaluations were shared – including mood meter, spider diagram and a questionnaire to assess level of learning amongst participants. The participants engaged in evaluation of the training workshop using these tools. Then came the closure of the workshop.
On each day, the participants used different methods of doing recaps and daily evaluations. They also took turns doing energisers throughout the training. The feedback from the participants was very positive, and the facilitators also highlighted that they too had opportunities for learning and felt like co-learners in the process.
